ETH-Bibliothek

Cumulus takes care of ETH’s digital archive

“Without Cumulus, I don’t know how all these services could be offered.”

Dr. Rudolf MumenthalerHead of Innovation & Marketing
ETH

Challenge

ETH-Bibliothek quickly outgrew its first digital asset management system, needing something more powerful to keep pace with increasing demand from university departments.

“Each department needed their own taxonomies and metadata,” explained Dr. Rudolf Mumenthaler, Head of Innovation and Marketing at ETH. “Plus, they wanted control over who saw their images.” ETH-Bibliothek also needed an easy-to-administrate system to accommodate requests from researchers worldwide. “Images are increasingly important for teaching, documentation and research.”

As a result, the library’s main requirements were the ability to provide catalogs to each department, offer cross-platform support, and the system had to be Web accessible with no user software required.

Even better, Cumulus was an open system the library could integrate with Google – to lead Internet users right to the university’s virtual front door. Google image search provides links directly into Cumulus where users can learn more about an ETH image, preview it with zoom and pan, and download it in one of several formats..

Results and Benefits

With Cumulus onboard, ETH-Bibliothek’s thousands of images are securely accessible from anywhere around the world, benefiting researchers wherever they may be.

Integrated with Google, the digital asset man- agement system handled a staggering 2,000 percent increase in Web traffic in 12 months. Because images are more readily available, revenue collection from fee-based commercial use of assets has also increased.

Success of the project depended on access and distribution control, and Cumulus had the best solution” said MumenthaIer. Expansion plans include creating additional departmental catalogs and, to further boost revenues, adding a PayPal link.

About ETH-Bibliothek

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Bibliothek (ETH-Bibliothek) presides over the university’s valuable archive of more than 300,000 digital assets. As an usher of many of the technological evolutions of the past century and a half, the university has generated a storehouse of images that are important to its own professors as well as researchers across the globe.